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I work in Canada in tech, although my last few jobs have been for San Francisco based startups as a remote worker. I've worked at every level from programmer to running all of development for a 150 person company, although I mostly do the individual contributor thing these days. Mostly for startups, with a few bigger companies here and there. I'm technically a contractor, which sort of sucks since it puts things like health insurance squarely on my shoulders, which is probably overall better than it would be in the U.S. but with some really crappy aspects (Pre-existing condition exemptions are still very much a thing which means I'll have to face $15K / year in prescription costs in a couple of years). Pay is good though which makes up for this, and I have no major complaints from a financial perspective. While the stereotypes of crazy hours and no work life balance in tech are true for some companies, it doesn't take long to learn how to root those companies out, and there's plenty of companies that are pretty flexible on hours. I wouldn't say I'm underworked by any means, but I put in a solid 40 hours and only in extremely rare cases (like 1-2 weeks a year) does it go over that. In my experience, the idea of big companies being less lovely due to reverting to the mean is somewhat true, but larger companies also tend to be less outwardly lovely due to bureaucratic layers and policies being added bit by bit to address some shortcoming. So on one hand, there's less room for a single person to be lovely (or exceptionally great), but in addition there's more explicit controls around bad behaviour. In my experience working in bigger businesses, it can definitely make things run less smoothly, and at least some of the policies are misguided or overly blunt. I think in terms of how companies run best - this is obviously going to be specific to tech and I'm not sure how well it can be generalized - but I think a lot of people worry about control and how top-down decisions are made, while in a lot of cases businesses would benefit from not making these top-down decisions in the first place. It was an obvious but always unspoken truth in one of my companies that the products and add-ons that were the main revenue drivers were usually a result of developers, CS people, or other individual contributors thinking of something and hacking away on it for a week or two, while the top-down 6 month strategies that management came up with were always embarrassing failures. There's a strong cultural expectation that decisions need to be top-down, but if you really think about it, a very small percentage of what a business does really needs to be controlled / approved / whatever by managers. I think unlike governments, companies are a place where anarchist-type principles and practices can really work (probably provided the company is small enough). Another cultural expectation that's somewhat lovely in tech startups, and I imagine really a lot of professional white collar fields, is that there's an unspoken assumption that labour laws just simply don't apply to you. Even if you're not exempt from overtime legislation (IT workers are exempt where I am), it would be absolutely unthinkable to suggest that you're paid overtime. Even though Ontario has a strong labour board and you generally can't be fired without cause, it routinely happens (usually by being "asked to resign" with the unspoken threat that your reputation will be ruined if you force the companies hand on this). I've worked in companies where the sales team was literally locked in their basement sales pit until 10 PM (I think it was until they hit a certain number), and the company and the sales team treated this as some wacky goofy startup thing. enki42 fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Aug 29, 2018 |
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Aug 29, 2018 14:30
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 00:38 |
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